March 11 (Bloomberg) -- JD.com Inc., the Chinese retailing
website that filed for a $1.5 billion U.S. initial share sale in
January, may kick off its offering in the second quarter, three
people with knowledge of the matter said.

In a vote of confidence ahead of its planned public
offering, Tencent Holdings Ltd., Asia’s largest Internet
company, is taking a 15 percent stake in JD.com and will
transfer its e-commerce business onto that site, according to a
statement on March 9. In the deal, Tencent assigned JD.com a
valuation of more than $20 billion by the time it goes public,
said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because
the information is private.

The new investment will allow JD.com, with its established
market of 36 million active customer accounts, to tap the 272
million active users on Tencent’s WeChat message service to
boost traffic to its online store. JD.com, which named Tencent’s
Yixun.com, Amazon.com Inc.’s China unit and Alibaba Group
Holding Ltd. as competitors in its IPO prospectus, will be
better positioned against rivals with Tencent’s backing, said
Eric Jackson, president of Ironfire Capital LLC.

“There was little excitement around the JD.com filing when
it first came out, but investors will look at this a lot
differently now that they’ve got big brother Tencent behind
them,” he said.

JD.com’s January filing indicated a placeholder amount used
to calculate fees that may change. The company wants to avoid
listing at the same time as Alibaba, people familiar with the
situation have said. Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce
company, also plans to go public this year, people have said.

U.S. Listing

Alibaba, which has weighed a share sale in both the U.S.
and Hong Kong, is moving toward a U.S. listing after talks with
Hong Kong’s exchange on a proposed corporate governance
structure fell apart, people with knowledge of the matter said
last year.

Representatives for Tencent, based in Shenzhen, China, and
Beijing-based JD.com declined to comment. Alibaba has no
timeline for the IPO, and it hasn’t chosen banks or a venue yet,
spokeswoman Florence Shih said on March 7.

Chinese companies raised more than $900 million from first-time share sales in the U.S. last year, more than five times the
amount in 2012, data compiled by Bloomberg show. JD.com’s
offering would be the biggest ever for a Chinese Internet
company in the U.S., the data show.

Many Chinese companies are attracted to the higher
valuations they can get for their stocks in the U.S. lately,
according to Josef Schuster, founder of IPOX Schuster LLC. His
IPOX China Composite Index, which tracks the trading performance
of Chinese companies that were recently listed in the U.S. and
Asia, has jumped 15 percent over the past year. That compares
with a 4 percent decline for the Hang Seng Index.

“The performance of recent IPOs has been driving the
demand for Chinese deals,” Schuster said by phone from Chicago.
Five out of eight Chinese IPOs listed in the U.S. over the past
year have more than doubled since their debuts, such as 500.com
Ltd., an online sports lottery operator, data compiled by
Bloomberg show.